ATMs provide banking customers the ability to access bank account information, deposit funds and withdraw funds. ATMs may often obviate the need for a banking customer to consult a human clerk. Additionally, ATMs may be located in a variety of diverse locations remote from banking centers. For example, ATMs may be placed on street corners, in convenience stores, supermarkets or sports arenas. The wide variety of possible locations for an ATM provides banking customers with access to cash and banking account information at convenient public locations.
To prevent the risk of fraudulent access to a customer's banking account information a typical ATM requires a customer to insert a plastic card containing a magnetic stripe or chip. The card is typically issued by the customer's bank and/or other financial institution (collectively hereinafter, “bank”). The magnetic stripe or chip may store data including a unique card number and security information.
In addition to requiring a customer to insert a card, ATMs provide an additional level of protection. Following the receipt of the bank card information, an ATM will prompt the customer to input a personal identification number (PIN). Only if the PIN entered is properly associated with the card inserted by the banking customer will the ATM allow access to cash and bank account information.
However, the wide variety of locations associated with ATMs and lack of close human supervision at the ATM increases the risk of unauthorized access to a customer's bank account information. For example, a thief may utilize a skimming device placed on or in an ATM that reads data encrypted on a banking card's magnetic stripe. The skimmer may be placed over a card slot reader of an ATM and may read the magnetic stripe as the card is inserted into the slot.
A customer may not notice that a skimmer has been placed on or in an ATM because the skimmer may not impede legitimate access to the customer's bank account information. Thus, the skimmer may obtain information encoded on a bank card's magnetic stripe in a manner transparent to the customer. Additionally, the skimmer may wirelessly transmit obtained customer information thus obviating the need for the thief to physically access the skimmer.
A skimmer may also include a hidden camera that may capture a customer's PIN. A hidden camera may also be placed in a different location than a skimmer. The camera may track the hand movements of a banking customer as the customer inputs a PIN. The sequence of different inputs available for selection and their positions are conventionally fixed and uniform for ATM input devices. For example, numeric inputs are displayed in three rows of three inputs and a fourth row having a single input. In a numeric display the number “1” usually appears in the left top corner, the number “3” usually appears in the top right corner and “0” usually appears in the fourth row.
The fixed sequence and positions of the numeric buttons allows an unscrupulous observer to map the movement of the customer's fingers to the numbers entered by the ATM customer. The mapping therefore exposes the customer's PIN. Together with information obtained by a skimmer, an unscrupulous observer may possess the confidential information needed to access a banking customer's cash and bank account information.
Alternatively, an unscrupulous observer may affix a thin keypad overlay to an ATM's keypad. The keypad overlay may contain circuitry that records the buttons pressed by a banking customer. The recorded information may include a PIN entered by the customer.
Additionally, a recording of buttons pressed, or a recording of a customer's hand movements may contain a date and time stamp. The date and time stamp would allow an observer to correlate information gleaned from a skimmer with inputs selected by a customer at the time a specific bank card was inserted. The correlation associates a customer's confidential bank card information to his or her PIN information.
Skimmer devices, keypad overlays and hidden cameras are becoming increasingly common and increasingly difficult to detect. Only a pinhole sized camera is needed to record PIN information. The miniscule footprint of hidden cameras allows the cameras to be skillfully hidden and hard to identify. A keypad overlay or skimmer may look and feel like a legitimate part of the ATM operating in a manner transparent to a customer.
According to the European ATM Security Team (EAST), a not-for-profit payment security organization, ATM crimes in Europe have increased 149 percent between 2007 and 2008. Most of the increase has been linked to ATM skimming attacks. During 2008, a total of 10,302 skimming incidents were reported in Europe. In the United States, between April and May of 2010 one bank estimated its losses due to compromised PIN numbers to be over 200,000 USD.
Therefore, it would be valuable to provide more secure systems and methods of conducting ATM transactions. More secure systems and methods for conducting ATM transactions would help reduce the losses of a banking center and help reduce customer inconvenience due to compromised bank account information. Furthermore, a more secure ATM transaction would give banking customers additional confidence that they are less likely to be victims of identity and/or monetary theft.
Accordingly, it would be desirable to provide systems and methods which reduce exposure of banking customers' confidential PIN and bank account information.